By
On Top Magazine Staff
Published:
June 03, 2014

A Southern Baptist church in California
has elected against ousting a pastor who came out in support of gay
rights and against the Southern Baptist Convention's (SBC) official
position on homosexuality.

Pastor Danny Cortez told elders at New
Heart Community Church of La Miranda, California that he no longer
believes that being gay is a sin.

In
a letter posted at Patheos, Cortez explained that he changed his
mind on the subject last August and that his son Drew came out to him
last fall. In a
YouTube video posted in February, Drew discussed coming out to
his family.

“One day, while in a car ride with my
dad to school, the song Same Love by Macklemore came on the
radio,” Drew said in the nearly 15-minute video. “And my dad
mentioned something like he loved the song and what the song had to
say. I asked him what his thoughts were on the whole gay issue. He
told me that he kind of had a change of heart and that he no longer
thought it was a sin. And then he asked me what I thought. And I
could tell that he was trying to pull it out of me. And that's when
I told him that I was gay. We hugged and we cried in the middle of
the parking lot and we talked for like 45 minutes.”

But on May 18, the congregation voted
against firing Cortez and for becoming a “Third Way” church,
which is neutral on the issue. Some who disagree with the outcome
said they would leave the church.

Albert Mohler, president of the
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a vocal opponent of gay
rights, rejected the church's “third way” position in a
June 2 blog post.

“I am confident that the Southern
Baptist Convention will act in accordance with its own convictions,
confessions of faith, and constitution when messengers to the
Convention gather next week in Baltimore,” Mohler wrote. “But
every single evangelical congregation, denomination, mission agency,
school, and institution had better be ready to face the same
challenge, for it will come quickly, and often from an unexpected
source.”